Finland is boiling with rage this weekend over the $25 M bonus payment the CEO Stephen Elop is set to receive as he leaves Nokia after his two-year tenure. Questions are now being raised by the oddest aspect of the bonus: the board of Nokia seems to have given Elop a $25 M incentive to sell the handset unit cheaply to Microsoft way back in in 2010. This effectively means that the board hired a man who was given a giant carrot to drive down Nokia's overall valuation and phone volumes while preparing a sale to Microsoft. What could possibly be a reason to structure Elop's original contract in this manner? Did the board in fact end up promising Elop more compensation in case he sells the phone division than if he runs it with modest success?

First of all, Nokia was already a mess when Elop arrived, Nokia was to incompetent to build a toolkit and displace the iPhone, they didn't want to use Android, they went from GTK to Qt and that sucked also, mainly because GTK is not friendly and Qt was alpha quality on mobile, so they had to fix that first and it took them to much time, so they needed a toolkit recognized and friendly that was not Android, Elop proposed Windows the sharehloders agreed, end of story.

Qt was alpha quality on mobile, so they had to fix that first and it took them to much time, so they needed a toolkit recognized and friendly that was not Android, Elop proposed Windows the sharehloders agreed, end of story.

Actually, having fixed Qt into the foundation of an award-winning (on N9) product- and notice how many competing products are now leveraging their Qt investment in mobile - it was doubly foolish to then abandon it and go with another alpha quality product, Windows Phone 7.

The lack of a quick reaction killed Nokia, not Elop.

Yes, it was the potentially fatal disease that afflicted Nokia when Elop took over. Missing the 2010 holiday selling season with N9 was a huge blow.

It's possible that nothing could have saved Nokia in 2011, but a "Symbian Forever" announcement to keep the faithful on-board during the transition, touting the N9 roll out as the revolutionary product the reviewers consistently said it was, and quietly shifting gears to focus on Android camera phones is still the obvious and best strategy - as so many were saying in 2011.

Frankly, if Nokia couldn't make money in smartphones with the most popular OS on the planet, they certainly wouldn't win with the bargain bin OS that until recently was WinPhone. *shrugs*

People stopped buying a lot of nokia stuff after the iPhone and Android started getting a foothold.

I owned nokia phones of various pedigree and always like symbian and their build quality (I still have a 3210 backup phone that works fine), but everyone was having android kit or blackberries in the UK from 2008 ...

I used to live in one of the biggest yuppie towns outside of London and the trend was obvious.

Yeah, a lot faster, but the mobile ecosystem is not just the phone software, it also the store infrascructure, the developer tools, the security, the browser, the services, etc, etc. And MS delivered those in a record time.